The things I tend to gravitate towards:

• Flatpak
• Firefox of some kind (lately been loving Floorp)
• Keeper Password Manager extension on Firefox
• try to install some form of backup
• git (if not already available)
• nvm (Node version manager, usually I install the latest LTS)
• Go (sometimes I write Go programs)
• Steam (if I plan to play games)
• Sometimes I’ll install Zsh, sometimes Fish, then oh-my-zsh / oh-my-zsh
• Fastfetch (Neofetch is so slow?)

Oh, this is a flipping great question. So much fun as I’ve just settled on one distro. M$ won’t allow me to transfer my transferrable Windows license and I refuse o pay yetagain for Windows so Linux is my sole OS from now on. I have had so many weird issues or configuration woes with a ton of OSs ive been trying. So I tell ya, I sure have installed my fair share of them in the last month or so.

GUI:

• Steam (Gotta get my game on)
• ProtonPlus
• Lutris
• Heroic
• Winetricks
• Protontricks
• VLC
• Brave
• Bitwarden(Probably the second most important software in my life)
• Authy
• Krusader (No idea why but Ill use this before the built in file manager sometimes)
• Plex htpc
• Kate - Notepadqq (havent decided which one i like best yet)
• PolyMC
• LibreOffice
• Flatpack (I always prefer the native package but flatpack has almost anything the repositories lack)-
• Appimagelauncher (Just for ease of use, appimages are a always third fiddle but are a great backup as flatpacks can be - limited in available software compared)
• Gimp (Almost exclusively because the name makes me giggle)
• OBS Studio

CLI:

• MC (100% always the first this I ever install no matter what)
• HTOP (Not standard in all as many distros as i would think)
• Openssh
• Cifs-utils
• Starship
• Zsh
• Neofetch
• Tmux (Cant live without it)

Of course there are tons of other small things I add but those are the ones I will have installed likely before I go to reboot for the first time. The rest of what I interact with is generally running on my server so it’s all web based stuff for the most part. I use VNC often to interact with virtual machines, do tech support for my son so i don’t have to get up (disabled). I haven’t really found a Linux VNC client i genuinely like. I used to use TightVNC with Windows and it’s about the only thing I miss. I do have a Guacamole docker running on my network but unless you have a physical KB/M it’s less than preferable to use. I’ll find something I like eventually I’m sure. 👍-----

Also, how do you go about migrating your old config and rc files? Start fresh or just copy em over and make adjustments where necessary?

I keep all of my important configs and dot files in a git repo. When setting up a new system I clone that repo and then symlink to them in the appropriate places

GUI:

• GnuCash
• Firefox

CLI:

• aptitude

Apart from what you mentioned:

• Steam
• Darktable
• cmatrix (very important)
• pfetch
• vim
• Hugo
• clipboard manager

I think that’s about it!

byobu

guix home reconfigure home-config.scm

deleted by creator

Strawberry, qBittorrent, neovim

ansible

I also don’t consider myself a distrohopper (I’ve only installed Ubuntu based distros), but I did recently install Ubuntu and KDE Neon on separate computers.

It really depends on what I’m using the computer for, but I’ll list my most commonly used applications by importance tiers:

A Tier (cannot live without these):

• Firefox
• Neofetch (obviously)
• A GUI file manager (doesn’t really matter which one)
• A usable Desktop Environment

B Tier (extremely useful but nonessential):

• LibreOffice
• Xournal++ (for taking notes, and editing PDFs)
• Baobab (for recording disk usage)
• Steam
• VLC (video player)
• Clementine (music player)
• htop (CLI system monitor)
• GUI “appstore”

C Tier (very useful, but quite niche):

• VSCode
• Vivaldi
• Retroarch
• Krita
• Kdenlive
• OBS Studio
• Wine
• GUI system monitor
• Standalone PDF viewer

git clone ssh://[email protected]/~/dotfiles.git

I don’t distro hop, but I keep my most commonly used programs as appimages in my home, as well as some locally compiled programs that I install in ~/.local/bin and ~/.local/lib.

Those include essentials like:

• i3wm
• polybar
• rofi
• handlr (regex one)

And for the programs, those include:

• brave
• ferdium
• freetube
• gimp
• librewolf
• libreoffice

That way I can drop my home onto any distro and everything will work at once. No need to manually install programs.

I also have wrapper scripts on my PATH that force applications that don’t comply with the xdg base dir spec to use a fakehome in ~/.local, like steam and the web browsers.

nomacs

Usually I install:

• Steam
• flatpak
• discord
• gimp
• vlc
• lutris
• protonupQ
• protontricks

The rest I install once I need it. Plasma delivers also many of my programs.